Making Music Modern

New York in the 1920s

Carol J. Oja

This book recreates an exciting and productive period in which creative artists felt they were witnessing the birth of a new age. Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, George Gershwin, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson all began their careers then, as did many of their less widely recognized compatriots. While the literature and painting of the 1920's have been amply chronicled, music has not received such treatment. Carol Oja's book sets the growth of American musical composition against parallel developments in American culture, provides a guide for the understanding of the music, and explores how the notion of the concert tradition, as inherited from Western Europe, was challenged and revitalized through contact with American popular song, jazz, and non-Western musics.

Making Music Modern

New York in the 1920s

Carol J. Oja

Description

New York City witnessed a dazzling burst of creativity in the 1920s. In this pathbreaking study, Carol J. Oja explores this artistic renaissance from the perspective of composers of classical and modern music, who along with writers, painters, and jazz musicians, were at the heart of early modernism in America. She also illustrates how the aesthetic attitudes and institutional structures from the 1920s left a deep imprint on the arts over the 20th century.

Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still, Edgar Varèse, Henry Cowell, Leo Ornstein, Marion Bauer, George Antheil-these were the leaders of a talented new generation of American composers whose efforts made New York City the center of new music in the country. They founded composer societies--such as the International Composers' Guild, the League of Composers, the Pan American Association, and the Copland-Sessions Concerts--to promote the performance of their music, and they nimbly negotiated cultural boundaries, aiming for recognition in Western Europe as much as at home. They showed exceptional skill at marketing their work. Drawing on extensive archival material--including interviews, correspondence, popular periodicals, and little-known music manuscripts--Oja provides a new perspective on the period and a compelling collective portrait of the figures, puncturing many longstanding myths.

American composers active in New York during the 1920s are explored in relation to the "Machine Age" and American Dada; the impact of spirituality on American dissonance; the crucial, behind-the-scenes role of women as patrons and promoters of modernist music; cross-currents between jazz and concert music; the critical reception of modernist music (especially in the writings of Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfeld); and the international impulse behind neoclassicism. The book also examines the persistent biases of the time, particularly anti-Semitisim, gender stereotyping, and longstanding racial attitudes.

Making Music Modern

New York in the 1920s

Carol J. Oja

Table of Contents

An Introduction: The Modern Music ShopEnter the Moderns 1. Leo Ornstein: "Wild Man" of the 1910s2. Creating a God: The Reception of Edgar Varèse3. The Arrival of European ModernismThe Machine in the Concert Hall 4. Engineers of Art5. Ballet Mécanique and International Modernist NetworksSpirituality and American Dissonance 6. Dane Rudhyar's Vision of Dissonance7. The Ecstasy of Carl Ruggles8. Henry Cowell's "Throbbing Masses of Sounds"9. Ruth Crawford and the Apotheosis of Spiritual DissonanceMyths and Institutions 10. A Forgotten Vanguard: The Legacy of Marion Bauer, Louis Gruenberg, Frederick Jacobi, and Emerson Whitmore11. Organizing the Moderns12. Women Patrons and ActivistsNew World Neoclassicism 13. Neoclassicism: "Orthodox Europeanism" or Empowering Internationalism?14. The Transatlantic Gaze of Aaron Copland15. Virgil Thomson's "Cocktail of Culture"16. A Quartet of New World NeoclassicistsEuropean Modernists and American Critics 17. Europeans in Performance and on Tour18. Visionary CriticsWidening Horizons 19. Modernism and "The Jazz Age"20. Crossing Over with George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, and the ModernistsEpilogueSelected Discography

Making Music Modern

New York in the 1920s

Carol J. Oja

Author Information

Carol Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University. She is co-editor of Aaron Copland and his World, as well as author of Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds, which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, and American Music Recordings: A Discography of U.S. Composers.

Making Music Modern

New York in the 1920s

Carol J. Oja

Reviews and Awards

ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and the Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music

"Carol Oja's Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s is a work of remarkable ambition and of equally remarkable achievement. ... Drawing on extensive, impressively documented research into primary sources and secondary literature, Oja illuminates both history and reception history in a gracefully written text that is enhanced with generous pictorial ad musical illustrations. This is a book that will command the attention of any reader with an interest in twentieth-century musical culture. ... This book is in every respect a major addition to the literature on American music."--Journal of the American Musicological Society

"Pioneering....This is important history, and [Oja] cover[s] all of it, conservatives and radicals alike, with fascinating sidelights on critics, female patrons of contemporary music and of course on individual composers....[Oja reveals] that modern music in the 20's was diverse and multicultural, with jazz and Latin overtones, women composers and one strong African-American, William Grant Still. And [she shows] that American modernism could be provocatively different from the European kind."--The New York Times Book Review

"[A] superb exploration of the classical music scene in New York City during the 1920s and early 1930s....Profiles a variety of composers, both well known (Aaron Copland) and little remembered (Dane Rudhyar)....[Oja's] ability to show how styles such as neoclassicism and the use of technology or dissonance combined to form a new genre of `American' music is a distinguishing feature....Exhaustively researched and written in an intelligent, engaging style, this book is highly recommended."--Library Journal

"Marvelous....[Oja] wisely recognizes both the internationalism of the music scene during the 1920s [and] the huge importance of the developing new music infrastructure that emerged during the 1920s....Oja avoids the cultural exclusivity so prevalent among musicologists in her virtuosic contextualization of the emerging new music in the broader world of arts and ideas....A remarkable study."--Institute for Studies in American Music

"Brings a multidimensional perspective to examining the music scene in 1920s New York. Having unearthed extensive archival materials (including interviews, correspondence and little-known music manuscripts), Oja dispels many myths and considers art in conjunction with contemporary social, cultural, and political issues."--Publishers Weekly

"A richly nuanced history that illuminates particular compositions as well as the general relationship between modern music and modern life....A compelling, insightful, and readable study of the fascinating world of new music in New York."--Notes

"In its rich accumulation of detail, its overlapping and sometimes conflicting perspectives, and its occasional confusion of the substantial and the imaginary, Oja's book on New York is a mirror of its wonderful subject....Making Music Modern will be for many readers a bridge to an enticing new world."--Music & Letters

"If the visual art and literature of that era has so far received considerably more attention from historians than has its musical legacy, this absorbing study by Carol J. Oja goes a long way towards correcting the deficiency."--usic & Letters